GerShun Avilez

The idea of the “transgender tipping point” has circulated widely in the public sphere. Treva Ellison explains that the term describes “a historically significant time of representational saturation of transgender people, identity, and struggles in popular culture, media, and public discourse and debate” (2).¹ Ellison goes on to put pressure on the progress narrative that underlies this idea and directs our attention backward in time to performative protest strategies that precede this “tipping point.” In the process, Ellison highlights a persistent public interest in gender and sexual nonconformity, and this emphasis opens up an interpretive path that moves away from the emphasis on visibility. Following this cue, I want to approach the question of trans visibility from another angle: rhetorical approaches to the problem of representation. I want to shed light on the desire to see and scrutinize the trans body. Ellison reminds us that this desire to see the non-gender-conforming body is not new. Along those lines, in a conversation with scholar Che Gossett, artist and writer Juliana Huxtable refers to this interest as the “pornographic obsession with transgender bodies” (42).² This obsession with bodies can be thought of as a fixation with and desire to know anatomy, often in ways that seek to erase or invalidate trans identity and experience.     

In this essay, I consider how life writing can provide a means to counter this pornographic obsession. Specifically, I will discuss Janet Mock’s two memoirs: Redefining Realness (2014) and Surpassing Certainty (2017).³ In this pair of memoirs, Mock offers a discursive crafting of womanhood while evading a spectacularization of the body. Mock is critical of the fetishistic desire to know about trans bodies; instead, she calls attention to her own body, precisely to direct attention elsewhere—particularly to the structures of race, gender, and class that shape social and political experience. In her writing of womanhood, she thus takes advantage of our desire to know in order to think beyond the body to larger structures of power. 

The desire to resist or disrupt the objectifying overemphasis on trans embodiment can yield a suspicion of or movement away from corporeality. C. Riley Snorton describes this as the realm of the “polyvalence of shadows” as well as the “right to opacity,” which he connects to trans embodiment in his racial history of transness.⁴ The response to this visibility can be seen in acts of hiding but also—moving across modalities—in acts of silence. Mock’s life writing shows us something else, another approach to the desire to know. Her autobiographical texts highlight her body, but they do so through a recurring rhetorical move that redirects such attention to questions of ethics, power relations, and self-critique. 

Mock is wary of an overemphasis on the trans body because of the prurient and invasive attention that follows this body, these individuals, through space. However, Mock simultaneously rejects this interest while focusing on the materiality of her own body, her own relationship to her anatomy. To be fair, how could one not write about one’s body as one writes about one’s developing self? There is tension here in the narrating of her body and her relationship to her body: the necessity of paying attention to embodiment and the need for shifting the public gaze.  

There is a significant amount of narrative focus on Mock’s body across both memoirs. For example, we read about a moment in which Janet has semen left on her chest after she has become a sex worker and is trying to raise money for her gender affirming surgery (I use “Janet” here to refer to the acting subject of Mock’s narrative, rather than the authorial presence who constructs the text). However, these kinds of references to her body as she takes up sex work have less to do with a showing of her body than the revelation of the actual labor of sex work. As Mock states, “Sex work is work” (200). Immediately after Felix, who is a porn photographer, ejaculates onto Janet’s chest, he schedules another shoot (or filming) for $1,500. She is effectively scheduled for her next shift before being able to clean herself up and get paid for the time she is working. The attention to her body here is not about the showing of a woman’s parts or even the intimate encounter between a cis man and a trans woman. Rather, the text displays sexualized power dynamics and Mock’s gendered vulnerability. This vulnerability is made even clearer when Janet agrees to allow Felix to take pornographic photographs of her for money pages later. If part of the danger of being photographed—and later signing away her rights to her image for more money—is that Mock loses the control of her visual image, perhaps part of the power of the publication and circulation of Redefining Realness is that it exposes Felix (and those like him) as a predator who obscures his sexual desire and economic manipulation behind ostensible acts of help. Janet’s images are out there, but his is too, in the book. Of course, the latter does not offset the power and meaning of the first, but it is significant how, again, the narrative attention to the trans body (in sex work or photography) is redirected toward a different kind of showing of power relations. In the same way, he turned her camera on her, she turns her narrative gaze onto him and shares it with us. 

As Redefining Realness moves to its close some pages later, Mock offers another moment when we can see the redirection of attention away from corporeality. One of the ways that the invasive interest in trans corporeality is legible is through questions about gender affirming or confirmation surgery. The desire to know about the procedure and to envision trans anatomy specifically is the basis of the prurient interest I reference. In chapter seventeen, the last substantive chapter of the memoir, Mock describes her very expensive trip to Bangkok to have her surgery. Although she does describe her interactions with supportive medical staff and the challenges of recuperating after a major procedure, what is most interesting about the description of the hospital stay is the conversation that she has with another patient, Genie, who had undergone the surgery a few days before. In many ways, their interaction is a study in contrasts: Genie is White, in her forties, and with economic resources; Mock is young, Black and Indigenous, and poor—basically cashless after the cost of travel and the procedure. They do grow close in the space of the hospital, but this chapter, which seems to be about anatomy, has as its heart a meditation on race, resources, and access:

[Genie] looked at me in awe, marveling at how well I could “pass,” as if I had everything because the world would read me as a desirable woman: young, attractive, and cis. I knew through various experiences that when I was presumed to be a cis woman, I was still operating in the world as a young black woman, subject to pervasive sexist and racist objectification as well as invisibility in the U.S. media, which values white women’s bodies and experiences over mine (236). 

The discussion of surgery gives way to this exploration on racism and sexism. The situational friendship they develop is haunted by Genie’s inability to recognize the privilege that she has as well as the reality of anti-Blackness that has been and will continue to be part of Mock’s life. In the space of the hospital, Mock shifts focus away from her genitalia and toward inequality.

This attention to the body that I trace in Mock’s writing does not just redirect an invasive gaze; it also becomes a means by which Mock is critical of herself and explores on her own attitudes about gender and embodiment. In Redefining Realness, Mock explains that after she begins taking hormones, she “blossomed” under the doctor’s care: her female secondary sex characteristics became more apparent. She became aware of a new desirability, which she says put her “in sharp focus of the male gaze” (156). These changes also led to a different dynamic with other young women: 

“I began looking in judgement at the girls Wendi [a close friend] and I hung out with. We were in varying phases of our development as trans girls. Some of us were considered ‘passable,’ while others were not. I glared at those whose shoulders spanned broadly, who were over five-ten, who twisted their hips as they walked, who laughed a bit too loudly or deeply. My body and appearance had been policed my entire life, so I began policing other girls” (156). 

Mock admits that she has played into or been seduced by the idea that beauty is currency and that it creates a hierarchy—here among those who are already marginalized. As much as Mock wants to shed light on this problematic way of thinking about beauty that saturates all sectors of society, she is also pointing out her own complicity in oppression. This focus on the body becomes a way to talk about unethical treatment and to present a figure, the central figure of the narrative, as not outside of the space of moral failing. My larger point is that the narrative as a whole alongside its successor are both constructed of such scenes that often ironically think through Mock’s corporeality in order to move away from an explicit focus on the trans body.  

There is a comparable moment in Surpassing Certainty, Mock’s second memoir. After Janet has moved to New York City for graduate school and secured a job, she makes friends with a group of Black women, and they have regular lunches together called—the “Brown Bag Lunches.” One day, the women are discussing the challenges of advancing in the publishing industry, in which they all work, and one woman, Anika, states that she was “too dark to be hired as a beauty editor.” Janet is quick to point out that there is a beaty assistant at InStyle who is “pretty brown,” which Janet insists means that “a dark girl can be hired as a beauty editor.” Another woman, Michaela, demands that Janet name another, and she cannot, leading to an important moment of self-reflection:

Instead of affirming Anika’s experience, I had negated her very real lived experience as a dark girl who had navigated colorism her entire life, not just in corporate America but also within blackness. My mixed black girl self—who was privileged by the hierarchy of the skin-color system—thought I was contributing something substantial by pointing out the exception to the rule […] We were all black girls, but we came to our blackness and ourselves differently. The way my hair curled, the way my brown glowed, the way I spoke and presented—those things gave me access in the media spaces we were eager to be let into. […] Our Brown Bag Lunches challenged all I had learned about being the exception. (168)

Her focus on her body and skin color becomes a means for critiquing her own problematic notions of access and social possibility. Mock points out her failure to contemplate her own privilege and recognize the complexity of Blackness as well as the complexity of a professional system that will tokenize individual women in order to circumvent actual change or progress. Moreover, even in this mea culpa moment, of acknowledging her investment in her exceptionalism, her description of herself seems to fall back into that trap. She describes her caramel-colored skin as “glowing” as if the descriptor glow is meant to denote the color itself, as if skin with more melanin would not glow. Mock’s moment of self-criticism or self-awareness may inadvertently perpetuate the problem she seeks to point out and distance herself from in the narrative. In addition, it is precisely her body that has enabled her to embrace the idea of her exceptionalism. Even if her exceptionalism is reaffirmed to some extent, the scene becomes one of ethical instruction for the young Janet and for the reader. Both Surpassing Certainty and Redefining Realness are constructed of such scenes that often think through Mock’s corporeality in order to move away from an explicit focus on the trans body and toward considerations of ethical dilemmas and social analysis. 

In her unparalleled study of movement memoirs, Angela Ards explains that “Life writing is about crafting a persona, selecting and shaping incidents of one’s life to articulate an ethic about how to move in the world, and then finding narrative strategies to represent that worldview on the page. Autobiography has thus become a favored theoretical space to think through issues of self-disclosure, memory, and performance, as well as the relationship between autobiography and its audience and how it intersects with questions of identity and agency in a world in which people feel increasingly powerless” (17).⁵ Taking a cue from Ards, I have been trying to trace out how Mock crafts a persona through these two texts. Surpassing Certainty is an explicit reminder of the carefully constructed nature of Redefining Realness because of elisions. In her second book, she writes about what she left out in presenting her autobiography: “In Redefining Realness, I omitted [her then husband] Troy, out of respect for his privacy but mostly because of the strength of the narrative. I preferred to present the portrait of a woman who had never had love, who had never been experienced, who was untouched until true love arrived. As a writer, it was the line of a stronger desire, one that offered simplicity for the reader. But love is not simple. It’s messy” (219). “Messy”: is a key word that recurs throughout the second memoir—along with the phrase “in process.” Through this language, I point out a narrative focus on messiness that I read as reflecting the ideas that undergird the title of the book: Surpassing Certainty. The title of the second memoir is a play on a quotation from Audre Lorde: “at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”⁶  In addition to weaving in Lorde’s body of work and trenchant analysis of gender expression and female embodiment,⁷ the citation does more work. Mock’s reference to Lorde indicates a desire to move beyond certainty as a paradigm or goal. What might it mean to be uncertain and, more specifically, to be uncertain about the body? 

Mock’s rhetorical questioning of the body, her move to summon it in order to displace it, and her choice to embrace messiness and uncertainty, all suggest that the body itself is elusive—or should be seen as elusive and unknowable. Perhaps we do not know, cannot know, the body. Our certainty that we can look at our bodies and know them, enables constricting notions of sex and destructive notions of gender—because of the inexact, yet exacting connection between gender and sex. What if Mock is challenging all of us through these moments of tension and self-contemplation to move beyond the idea that we know our bodies, to move beyond the certainty of the body. As much as her books have a self-help component and showcase a persona who has learned from her mistakes and seeks to edify us all and encourage love of the body, the persona that is constructed never gets beyond these sites of tension and contradictions that surround the body. It is in these sites that we can begin to recognize a theorization of the body itself beyond knowable anatomy. The body might appear to be locatable, but maybe it is not. Admitting the possible uncertainty of the body can be powerful, and there can be pleasure in uncertainty. 

This emphasis on the pleasure available in the uncertainty of the body echoes Mock’s deep investment in Black women’s writing, especially Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. In the introduction to Surpassing Certainty, Mock reveals that she aspires “daily to be like Toni Morrison’s Sula” (xviii). This connection to Sula might shed more light on my discussion of the invasive interest in women’s anatomy and how writers act on that interest. Scholar Mae G. Henderson explains the community’s interest in Sula’s birthmark in Morrison’s novel, and what it seems to say about her character⁸: “the images associated with Sula’s birthmark connote a plurality of meanings. These images become not only symbols of opposition and ambiguity, but they evoke the qualities of permanence and mutability (nature and culture) inherent in the signs of the birthmark, the meaning and valence of which changes with the reading and the reader” (29). More than anything else, the birthmark becomes a means for the world to interpret Sula’s body. This mark of her biology is associated with her birth—and perhaps assigned meaning from the moment of her birth. The interest in the anatomical mark marks an interest in her person. It is a mark that gets connected to her sexuality and how people understand her gender presentation—as well as what her presence means for the rest of the community. Perhaps this interest in Sula’s anatomy is part of what draws Mock to this character and this novel. Henderson insists that through Sula and the birthmark, Morrison launches a counter-discourse, by “encoding the discursive dilemma of black women,” while also embodying a “code of resistance to the discursive and material dominance of black women” (30). What Henderson sees Morrison as accomplishing through the crafting of Sula, I offer that Mock does in the literary crafting of her own life: she resists the controlling dominance of the public gaze upon of Black womanhood. Mock redirects our anatomical desires to create space for her sense of self—even if that sense of self is at times conflicted. She shows us her body only to show us much more than her anatomy: her womanhood enmeshed in a network of relations of race, gender, and power. It is to the anatomy of this set of relations that we should—no, must—turn our gaze.

1. Treva Ellison, “The Labor of Werqing It: The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java,” Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Ed. Ina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 1-21. ↩︎
2. Che Gossett and Juliana Huxtable, “Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Ed. Ina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 39-56. ↩︎
3. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More (New York: Atria, 2014) and Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (New York: Atria, 2017). ↩︎
4. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↩︎
5. Angela A Ards, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). ↩︎
6. Mock, Surpassing Certainty, ix. ↩︎
7. The tensions that I track here build on Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s reading of Mock’s memoirs in The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021). ↩︎
8. Mae Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics and Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 16-37. ↩︎